Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [37]
I stare at him, entranced in spite of myself. “So you didn’t get a sports car?”
“Nope,” he says. “I got a baby blue sedan with low mileage. It had this huge, soft plastic thing on the gearshift, I guess because the old lady had bad hands or something. When I was upset, I’d pick at it. My parents—” He taps his fingers against the steering wheel. “My parents thought I was crazy.”
“So what happened to it?”
“My parents sold it,” he says. “Before I came here, they weren’t … they weren’t real happy with me.”
“No, I mean, what happened to the shopping list?”
“What?” he says.
“The shopping list. What happened to it?”
“I left it in the glove box,” he says. “I didn’t want to throw it away. It was her car first, you know? Plus—I don’t know. My parents have never done anything like make a shopping list.”
“They don’t like shopping?”
“They like shopping,” Eli says. “But not for food. They have people who do that. Pick out menus, buy the food, and make it. All that stuff.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. They don’t—they like the house to be run for them. Someone to cook, someone to clean, someone to take care of the laundry.”
“Right,” I say, like it’s no big deal, but inwardly I’m feeling even grubbier. Jack’s parents had money but not like this, not money to have someone do all the little things that make a house run for them. “You must miss having all of that.”
“No,” he says simply. “So, how come you don’t drive?”
I wonder what kind of trouble he got into with his parents. A guy who’d buy an old lady’s car because her relatives couldn’t be bothered to notice that she’d left behind a shopping list didn’t really seem like the kind of guy who’d be shipped off to live here.
But then, once upon a time Tess and Claire were such good friends that Tess had talked about the two of them as if they were practically one person, and then she cut Claire out of her heart like she was a stone that needed to be cast aside.
“I don’t have a car,” I say. “I did, but it was Tess’s—she bought it to drive back and forth to school with money she earned working at Organic Gourmet. She gave it to me after her first semester was over, when she decided she didn’t need to come home so much, and if she did, she and Beth could—”
“Beth. Is that the—?”
“Yeah,” I say. “The girl from before. Anyway, she and Beth came here back then, and Tess left her car. She said I could drive it if I wanted. When I first got my license, every time I went somewhere people would come up to the car and say, ‘Tess?’ and then look disappointed and try to cover it up when they saw it was only me.”
“Every time?”
“Close enough,” I say lightly, like the memory of those first few months I had the car, of people asking for Tess and their eyes dimming when they saw me, didn’t still sting.
“Why?” he says. “I mean, she’s pretty, but I don’t get why—you make it sound like you’re nothing compared to her.”
“I’m not nothing,” I say, although I think it’s actually pretty accurate. It sounds like self-pity to say it though, and I don’t want to start going there. I wallowed in it after Jack, in between my bouts of fury at him and Tess and myself, and what did it get me? Nothing. “I just—one thing about living with someone like Tess is that it makes you face up to things. Even if you don’t want to.”
It’s the closest I’ve ever come to talking about Jack with anyone but Claire. I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s strange how easy it is for me to talk to Eli.
It’s nice.
Eli’s silent for a long moment, and then we turn onto the road that leads to the ferry landing. There are a few cars waiting, parked with their lights on, casting a dim glow into the dark. “So, you still haven’t answered my question about why you don’t drive.”
I swallow, and almost wish he’d asked about the things I’ve had to face up to, that he’d push me to talk in a way that would lead to Jack. That, I could deflect. This, I can’t. It is why I am here. Why he is here with me.
“She was driving my—her—car,” I say. “It was New Year’s Day, the actual day part. The safe-to-drive-in part. She